As an answer to numerous request to my blog post I have compiled this set of samples of how musical some programs incidentally are. I have personally only listened to a few of them; flex and the first minutes of the 10th part of hhc seemed above the average.
Each program execution's sound is cut in one hour parts. Only the modified "wc" is deliberately short. Because of the range of frequencies in these samples I recommend high quality earphones - or loudspeakers if you want to upset your neighborhood. I accidentally left in a roughly ten second long silence in the beginning of each first hour file, so please be careful not to turn the volume to the max in case you at first don't hear anything.
This
work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 1.0 Finland License. In other words, be feel to copy,
play, remix, and rave as you please, only its use in "enhanced
interrogation" techniques is depreciated. It would be nice to
hear from people who have enjoyed or remixed these sounds into
something greater, or who have found particularly pleasing samples in
them.
Based on feedback I may discard some programs or add new ones, possibly generated by different criteria than "seven bits of results of additions and subtractions played at 3500 instructions per second". I also plan to publish, at a leisurely pace, some of the programs that I used to generate these samples.